In recent years, infectious bacterial and virus strains have become more common and a growing threat to the general public. This is true especially in third world countries, but amazingly the same threat faces almost every school gymnasium, private workout gym, hospital, school and business in all major countries. Private companies, public schools, hospitals and governments in general do not have the equipment, staff or tools to handle or effectively combat these kinds of bacterial and virus attacks. Surfaces shared by multiple families or children, who are often sweating from an illness, heat and/or exercise, end up sharing and spreading the contaminated biological materials from skin-to-skin and skin-to-contaminated-surface contact. Added to this are all types of adults, young adults and children who will leave to use the bathrooms in every type of school, gymnasium, home and business environment, and bring back additional bacterial contaminants on their shoes. As the primary play area for most children is the floor beneath their feet, the floor of many locations from kindergartens to daycare facilities to hospitals is often ripe with biological contaminants. As the various locations of surface-based infectious bacteria and viruses proliferate, especially shared exercise locations having mats and other floor surfaces where people come in contact with an ever changing bio-environment, the problem exists of how to effectively clean these surfaces in an effective, quick, repeatable and cost effective manner.
Commercial home-based robotic cleaning systems on the market today are intended for hard surfaces. But existing cleaning systems do not have the technology to eradicate infectious bacterial and virus strains effectively, or as a matter of routine, in the performance of their basic functions. This is mostly due to the fact that their design does not incorporate specific chemical or photonic emission devices whose chemical or wavelength parameters have been proven to effectively eradicate infectious bacterial and virus strains. Robotic cleaners having a vacuum system or even a mopping system do little or nothing against these infectious bacterial and virus strains. In fact, the mopping action of some systems can actually spread a contagion past its initial location to other sections of a floor surface and into the cleaning device itself. The use of chemicals (which may be harsh/unsafe and/or environmentally-unfriendly) in some of these mopping devices could limit the spread of contagion, but manufacturers have shied away from this approach because it would mean both a constant monitoring and reloading of chemicals into these devices to keep them effective, and the fact that the effective application of the chemicals on the desired floor or mat surfaces does not always provide 100-percent coverage or protection against the infectious bacterial and virus strains. What is needed is a device that utilizes a non-contact technology, such as UV light to disrupt the DNA structures within bacteria and virus, thus effectively eradicating these biological contaminants.